DAY 21
Had some down time today so I managed to tinker around some stuff I had laying around from the UE marketplace. Stuff I had that was useful but didn't know I had. I'm a hoarder like that :))
Be advised that these assets are all still placeholder assets. With this out of the way, here are some stills from the first platforming area:
Found a great waterfall asset that I want to reverse engineer. Once I figure out how to do it, I would like to add some stylized caustics to all the bodies of water as well. At first glance, it doesn't seem to be difficult: Make a plane that is bent 80-90 degrees or so at roughly one tenth of the length. The materials needed for this look like some strokes painted horizontally on a transparent-ish blue color, with a Panner added to fake movement. Seems easy enough.
As you can see, I've replaced the checkerboard pattern material with some stylized landscape material. I did not spent enough time tinkering on this, so it doesn't look pretty at all, but it's there. I have zero experience with landscape materials, so my guess is that it'll take a while until something noteworthy results from tinkering.
Regarding level design, I've spent some time considering adding areas that are strictly for exploration purposes and so I've started adding these areas.
This is a very rough idea of what I'm going to do, but it's a start. What's also a rough idea is whether or not I would leave the player wandering and find his own path as well as the intended path in and out of the exploration area. This would present the risks of skipping certain sections of the map and/or spending less time than the intended path would be.
One idea is to have the pure exploration areas interconnected with the intended level design path without being really able to progress further unless the player uses the "golden path". Either this or have a secondary "hidden" golden path towards the intended play area. These could both work, but surely this would come at a cost. I'll have to test which one would work best.
That's it for now, see you in the next post. Bye